Corners
by Gleam
Summary: The little stories that make up the dark corners of mythology. Folk tales, faerie tales, legends and myths: where the sun casts long shadows in the corners of the human mind. The letters of an older, more frightening world.
1. The Mull

**The Mull**

There are old faces under the soil; eyes that haven't seen sun for decades, centuries. Years and years, the seasons wheel away overhead and fling out into a sky-borne fiddler's dance: leaves, and hail, and rain, it all spirals overhead and crashes onto the earth.

The Mull, it does not care.

In the deep hollow places of the earth, where each echo is a heartbeat, lies the Mull. Stumpy limbs push it about as the leatherbound belly leaves a long track in the cavern floor: an elongated _v_ that emerges from beneath its ponderous weight. The Mull does not hunt, because it is patient, and it waits for things to die.

No mere scavenger is the Mull. It is like Death itself, stubbornly shoving along behind you, and no exhaustion slows its limbs. The sound of its belly scraping rings louder and louder in your ears until you can hear nothing else, and all you can see is the pitifully short legs, and the dull, thick claws tipping each of three toes. And the face.

The face like a frog's, wide and overbearing; fit to swallow a man whole, with a tongue that'd crush you to pieces so the swallowing 'twould be easier. Not kind is the Mull; it has no sympathy for the dead.

All things come to the Mull, in time. Bodies sink into the earthy clay, and the sky rains down little pieces of itself to dull the beast's hunger. All corpses go to the Mull to be eaten away and sink into its cauldron-belly. There they boil away, and the Mull breathes out a fog of spirits and souls. They rise back up through the soil, and we watch those clouds clump in little patches between hills, in valleys. They speak nothing but gabble, their lips long since digested, as their hearts boiled away in the cauldron-belly.

Soon enough there will be no more sky to sate the Mull's hunger; no more stars to fall into its gaping belly. Then it will eat, and eat; eat away the earth that shields it, jetting the steam-soil from fat nostrils and the pores of its skin.

Then there will be no more sky, and no more earth; no more people, and no more words. There will only be the Mull, that forever hungers to feed its cauldron-belly. And it will seek another earthy place to burrow into, and feast from within like a fat ringworm, or a parasite.

There its stubby claws will sink into new soil, and it will press its head into the earth; and dig, and dig, until it reaches the hollow places within the earth-bones, in the dirt-marrow, the stone-marrow. Where the lifeblood of a planet flows and souls gather to flock to strange places, and rise like evaporation into the atmosphere where they fall to soil again as stars. Where there is one more place for the Mull to sate its hunger.


	2. Flowerman

**Flowerman**

In the Solomon Islands there is a mountain, that you can see from any side of the shore. And its slopes are low and easy to climb, so if you walk up the hill a ways, on the northern side, you will see a meadow on a little flat spot about halfway up the mountain. This meadow, I saw it when I was a child; and my father's father saw it when he was a child; and his father's father's father saw it when he was a child. It's a place that sidesteps the gaze of not-children, hidden between the crags of rock.

There, in the neverdying meadow, there is a little old man, bent at the waist, who waters his flowers. The flowers riot in colors, iridescent and gleaming in the water, and they draw the children close. And if you speak to him, the little old man will smile at you, and give you a flower.

These flowers do not die, you see. You can take them home, and set them on the mantle without water; their roots will spread and sink into the stone, or the metal, or concrete. They are flowers that will not die.

And when they blossom, their roots firmly set, they open the bud and a wonderful scent comes out, like rosemary and myrrh and frankincense, like a new prophet being born. And this smell, it calls to you, your neighbors, everyone. They come and stand before this little flower, of red or blue or yellow, bright and iridescent.

And then in a couple days, the flower dies, and the child is no longer a child; the innocence stolen away by this lesson of life and death the flower teaches. It is a ritual of learning in the village; and when we are ready to die, the elderly worn and weak, we make this trek up the mountain, to the little old man and his flowers, and they are seen no more. Into the crags and the scent of rosemary, they vanish like pollen.

We here in the village, we live by the flowerman. He teaches us to grow, prunes us in our age. He is the flowerman and we are all his flowers.

He has no shears, just fingers as old as the earth and a weary, ancient patience. The flowers never die, they just pass on their seeds. And he tends them over and over, or so I supppose: I've only seen the flowerman once, after all.

But soon I'll go to see this meadow again, because my bones ache and it's hard to stand, so hard. And I want to go to the garden and lay down, and kiss the flowers, and give up my seeds.

I'll go to see that meadow again, where there's a quiet smile, and a little old man, and a garden of flowers that never die.

At least until we touch them.


End file.
